The Bulwark's top editor shares how the anti-Trump site tripled its subscriber base in a year — and why it's betting on YouTube

Business Insider

a day ago

If President Donald Trump didn't exist, the staunchly anti-Trump news website The Bulwark might not either.
But the president isn't solely responsible for The Bulwark's success. Instead, its top editor credits email newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube for its impressive growth in recent years.
"We grew consistently, all the way through the Biden administration," Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, said in an interview with Business Insider. "That's something I didn't expect."
To be sure, Trump's resurgence has added fuel to the fire that Last and his colleagues were kindling. The Bulwark surpassed 100,000 paid subscribers on Substack in early July, which the company told BI is more than double its total in late October — just before the 2024 election.
The Bulwark also now has 830,000 total subscribers, most of whom get its emails for free. The company said its total count has tripled in the last year and surpassed 500,000 a day after Trump retook office.
YouTube is another key part of The Bulwark's growth. It crossed 1 million subscribers on the platform in mid-February, and that count rose 34% between then and early July, thanks to a healthy mix of short-form snippets and long-form videos.
The news site uses YouTube Shorts, the platform's buzzy, TikTok-esque clips, as a foot in the door for newcomers. But long-form content of all kinds is crushing on YouTube, especially on TVs. The Bulwark's producers have taken note by making most of their videos at least 10 minutes long, and some run well over an hour.
"We no longer think of podcast and video as separate," Last said. "We just think of it all as broadcast."
The Bulwark was perfectly positioned for one of the wildest decades for news in the last century, complete with a pandemic, wars, and Trump's rise, fall, and rebound.
"It's been a crazy eight years," Last said. "People have been forced to pay attention to the news in ways which are reasonably unique, at least in our lifetimes."
Not just 'Never Trump'
The Bulwark has gained much of its notoriety for its sharp criticism of Trump. But when asked who he's writing for, Last said he's not necessarily targeting a certain political group.
"The target audience is people who take ideas seriously and aren't looking for confirmation bias and who think that the moment is important," Last said. He added: "I think of, honestly, our target audience as being indistinguishable from The Atlantic's."
While Last said many Bulwark readers are largely on the center left to the center right, he added that the main common thread among his reader base is a distaste for authoritarianism. To Last, that's synonymous with an unease, or outright disgust, with Trump and many of his policies.
"We're on a team, and the team is democracy," Last said.
However, Last said The Bulwark doesn't have a vendetta against Trump. If the president enacts policies that Last and his colleagues like — such as Operation Warp Speed, which accelerated COVID-19 vaccine development during the pandemic — he said they'll gladly tout them.
"We are not reflexively negative," Last said. "It's not like if Trump comes out and says that 'ice cream is good,' we have to say, 'ice cream is bad.'"
Still, Last's readers know that he sees Trump as a serious threat to American democracy.
"If I had described the events of 2020 to somebody in 2016, they would've said, 'You're crazy — that's "Trump Derangement Syndrome,"'" Last said.
Critics may shrug off The Bulwark's warnings as alarmist, but Last insists he's not crying wolf.
"The fact that people aren't freaked out by just the actual real things that have happened in front of our eyes is mostly a function of the pot being turned up while the frogs are in it," Last said.
Straightforward and direct
Authenticity sells in 2025, both in politics and media. Just look at the most popular podcasters, including Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper of "Call Her Daddy" fame.
Audiences also crave honesty, Last said. That honesty and authenticity, combined with strongly held convictions, have become cornerstones of The Bulwark's popularity.
"A lot of times, we'll sit around arguing with each other, and the argument will end with one of us going, 'Yeah, you guys are right. I got that wrong,'" Last said.
Unlike traditional media organizations, The Bulwark is built on Substack. The newsletter hub has been a huge part of the news site's rapid growth, Last said, since readers of other writers can discover The Bulwark and subscribe in a single click.
"Anything you can do to lower the friction just pays enormous dividends," Last said.
By building its business around newsletters, The Bulwark reaches readers directly, without intermediaries like search engines or social media.
Newsletters and podcasts can also build emotional connections. The Bulwark's publisher, Sarah Longwell, told Vanity Fair in May that "people feel like they are friends with us" since they hear their voices and can even reach their inboxes by replying to emails. This access makes The Bulwark feel fresher than newspapers or cable news channels, Last said.
"That's the sort of thing that you often get from independent media operators, if you're a one-man band on Substack," Last said. "But it's, I think, not as common to see that at an institutional level."
Putting MSNBC and CNN on notice
Although The Bulwark has roughly doubled its paid reader base since the election, Last sees much more room to grow.
The news site recently hired reporters to cover policy, immigration, and Congress, Last said. This can help The Bulwark add value through reporting, instead of just its opinions.
But the biggest potential for growth is YouTube, Last said, given that its subscriber base can scale far faster on the world's biggest video platform than on Substack.
The Bulwark could take its video strategy to the next level by producing shows in the style of traditional TV, Last said. He said his site is open to partnering with a streaming service, similar to The Daily Beast's deal with Netflix that was reported by Semafor.
MSNBC and CNN have been a go-to spot for the anti-Trump TV news audience for years. Last suggested that The Bulwark is willing to encroach on their territory and beat them at their own game.
"Cable news is dying," Last said. "All of the minutes of attention, which gets sucked up by CNN or Fox or whoever, those minutes are going to flow elsewhere. And I think that we should be a place where that attention goes."
Legacy networks like MSNBC may be able to coexist with new media outfits like The Bulwark, especially since its writers regularly go on the left-leaning cable network.
But regardless of who's pushing back against Trump, Last's hope is that American democracy is healthy. He doesn't want chaos, even if it can help his business, but he knows that's mostly out of his control.
"Given the choice between having half of our audience, but living in a normal time, I would absolutely take that," Last said.